How to Edit Video in Photoshop [Tutorial]

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How to Edit Video in Photoshop [Tutorial]Hello, my name is Jennifer Ayotte, and I'm the School of Design dean at Rasmussen College. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to edit video using Photoshop. Editing video in Photoshop is not nearly as tricky as it may seem to be when you first think of this. So, typically Photoshop in the past has been used for editing pixel-based static images, but recent iterations of Photoshop, including this Photoshop Creative Cloud, makes it pretty easy to work with animations as well as videos. So, in this case, I have nothing open in Photoshop, and I'm going to show you how to start from scratch with a video clip that you'd like to edit. So the first thing that you'd want to do is, you see that I have my timeline panel already open, but I'm going to close it to show you how to get that open. If you go up to the Window menu, scroll down to the bottom, and you'll see timeline. Now there are two different timelines that you can work with in Photoshop-- one for frame-based animation, and then one for video. In this case, of course, I'm going to be using video. So we have a couple different options for getting the video into our Photoshop document. We could simply do a File, Open, and navigate to the video file. In this case it's on my desktop. I could just come in here and pick the MOV. The other option you have is, in the timeline, this little icon here-- it looks like a filmstrip. You could add media that way, and it essentially does the same thing. So I'm going to go ahead and add the media. And, depending on the size of the media-- how the width and height is, and the resolution, and how long it is-- all of those things affect the file size. So it may take some time to actually import. But mine actually was pretty quick. Now, the cool thing about editing animations or, in this case, video as well, in Photoshop is that it operates on the same fundamental principles of layers. So, if you've ever worked in Photoshop, you know that every item should have its own layer. And what you see down here in the timeline, besides your time span here-- so you can see this clip is about two and a half minutes long-- what you're seeing down here, though, these elements are being pulled from the layers that you have in Photoshop. So if I had additional film, which I'm going to pull it in just a moment to show you, I would actually pull that in and it would make its own layer here, and be displayed also in the timeline. So what are we looking at here in the timeline? You can, of course, be able to play and see your video go through. You can also zoom in, zoom out, just like you would for a traditional image that you're looking at in Photoshop, depending on how close and up in to the media you need to get. You have the ability to basically control where you are, and what you're seeing in your video. You can, of course, just grab the scrubber-- the playhead-- just like any other Adobe program that has a timeline on it. But some of the other things that we're seeing here-- let's go back to the beginning, here. We could add a transition effect. So if you hover over any of these options in the timeline, if you hover over, you'll get the tool tip. This icon is select a transition, and drag to apply. So some of the transitions for video that are commonly used are anything from fading from left to right in the corner, to a cross-fade. You could fade with a specific color, or you could fade with black and white. And, of course, how long of the fade transition do you want it to be? So in this case we could do a fade with black, and let's make it about two and a half seconds. So what we did with that was we just created a transition, and we'll see it when we do the final production, but we can also-- let's see the next option here, that's to trim it. So if your video has a moment at the beginning or the end that you don't want to include in the project, you can simply move your playhead to that position, and you can use this, which will say split at playhead. So what they did was it actually didn't fully delete the video. It just moved it to a different video chunk, here, which I could, of course, get rid of. But in this case I want that, so I'm going to do a command-Z or control-Z to undo, because I want my full movie. So some of the other options we have here is in the actual video clip that we see here, we have this little fly-out menu in the upper right corner, and if we do that, we can see the qualities for both the audio and video. So in this case it tells me that my video is 158.62 seconds. I can speed it up or slow it down if I need to go in slow motion or I need it to be a fast-forward of sorts. And then if I have an audio clip, you have these same components here. But in this case I do have audio within the video, so I can make the volume fade in or fade out. I could reduce how strong the volume is, or I could completely mute it, if I just want the visuals of the video. So if we look at this layer here, some other things that we can work with for this Video Group 1-- and it's called Video Group 1 in both the layers palette and the timeline here-- because you have the video itself, and then you have some additional properties that you can adjust, so it groups it into a folder of sorts, so it all stays together. You can change the position, or the opacity, or you can even apply a style to it, if you like. And all of those things-- you can insert a keyframe, and you can manipulate things here-- I'm going to leave it just as is, but it's important to note that you do have the ability to apply styles, to change the video opacity, and of course the change of position if you don't want it perfectly on the center stage, filling it up. But, in this case, I'm going to leave it alone, and what I want to do is show you how to add a few design elements to video. That's usually why people come to Photoshop to edit video in the first place. So, if I wanted to add a red shape with some text to label the beginning of the video-- let me make sure my playhead's moved back-- and just as if we were working on a regular Photoshop document, we'll create a new layer. Now when I first created this new layer, you'll see that what it did was it put it within the Video Group 1 layer. We can see that here. I actually don't want it in the Video Group 1 layer. I want it as its own standalone piece. So I'm going to click and drag it up above, and, as soon as I did that there, it also created that here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create some text here, and I'm just going to give a label of "Demo Video." My font's a little big, so let me take that size down so we can see the whole thing. Actually, in this case, I'm just going to come back here and retype. Make that easier. And I'll move into position up here. So you'll see that in my timeline now, it inserted that text, but it didn't really have a time span. I need to click and drag-- when you see that little double-sided arrow head with a bracket-- that shows you that you can change, you can manipulate the span of that element. So, in this case, my "Demo Video" text is going to stay for a minute and 30 seconds, and then once it passes that moment there, it's going to pop off. So, that's a little long for a title. What I may do is just bring that back here. I can see my little tool tip there. It's going to be about-- about eight seconds long. So if I drag my playhead back, there we go. So, along those lines you can continue to bring in more video clips. They will be on their different layers. You could stagger them. You can have them appear at certain times in the movie, and disappear elsewhere. We know that we can change the opacity of that video, if you wanted to slightly fade into this background video. We can also make it a small thumbnail here in the upper left corner or upper right corner, if we wanted to. But it's all about the span-- the time span down below, and then working with layers, and then when you want to incorporate traditional art elements, such as shapes or text, again, make sure it's on its own layer, and you have it in the proper layer order. So if you need to be on top it is the topmost layer. It's not hidden by the other layers. And you just work with your art as if this were a Photoshop image file. So, the final component here is what do you do with this? How do you get it to be saved? Well, as always, with any Photoshop project, you should save as a PSD, because you always want to make sure that you have the ability to come back and edit. So, in this case, we will do demo_video.psd. But that doesn't help us get it out on the web, or send it to our producer, or send it to family and friends, or YouTube or Vimeo. So, what we need to do in that case, to make it a video format file that other people could see, instead of Save or Save As, we're going to go to Export and Render Video. That's how you create the video format. So again, it may take a little bit in order to finish up the job. You have various different components here. If you aren't familiar with these yet, that's OK, you've got time. But what it does tell you is some of the qualities about your video. So my document size is 320 by 240. That was the size of my original video. You can always go back and change that. Your frame rate. And then progressive field order. And then pixel aspect ratio, and color manage. Again a lot of these things are getting into the areas that you may not be comfortable with yet, if you're not comfortable with editing video. So you just may want to make sure that it has the right location it's saving to, the right name, and that you have the right quality or output type, depending on the device that you intend this to be viewed on. And that you make sure that you save it, and you render it as two separate files. And that is all that it takes to create a video-based project in Photoshop, and to be able to go back and edit and work with your layers and import art assets, other video, and even other audio. It's as simple as that. Thank you for watching this tutorial, and I hope you enjoy your new found skill set.

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Callie is a Content Marketing Specialist who writes helpful and encouraging career-focused content on behalf of Rasmussen College. Her eagerness for helping others combined with her creative writing passion makes her a great asset to past, present and prospective learners.

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